Thursday, 9 April 2009

Still on Holiday

What day is it? Yep, I sort of lost track over the past, however long. It’s easily done when you’re out of your normal routine. It is, I believe, Thursday, which means I have three days left here in Northern France before having to brave the British motorway system again to get home.

The past few days we’ve got all the ‘family’ stuff out of the way. You know, the visiting of relatives and what not. We haven’t been able to do as much outdoorsy stuff as we would have liked because the weather hasn’t been good. It’s been damn and cold. Yesterday, while we were in the hypermarket, the rain came down really badly. So for once I was glad I was in a shop.

Actually, that’s not very fair. It’s normally fun seeking out bargains in the French hypermarkets, but this time with Sterling at such lows, everything seemed a lot more expensive than usual. Spending over a hundred Euros hurts a lot more when you know you’re also spending over a hundred pounds instead of seventy or eighty. I really, really hope the pound recovers soon. But I doubt it will.

We almost died too yesterday on the way back from the shops. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but it was scary getting cut up at a roundabout by a damn bus trying to push into your lane. What made it worse was that the bus was then in the wrong lane for the island anyway – he should have stayed where he was.

Had this been in England, I’d have been livid. But for some reason when your in France you just accept it. It’s as if in England, everyone knows the rules and tries to obey them. So when someone blatantly breaks them, you get pissed off at them. But in France, everyone knows the rules, but everyone also ignores hem for the most part. It’s very much ‘everyman for himself’ so you just accept bad driving as par for the course.

Has anyone ever driven in Paris? If you have, you’re a braver man than me. I’ve stood and watched some of the drivers there and swore I’d never, ever try it.

Yesterday on Twitter I spoke about how writing some scenes can be hard on you emotionally. Like this one from Lost & Found that you can find on my website. I wrote a scene like that yesterday. It’s Amy & Will’s story again, which is getting to the point where i should be able to hammer down the home straight with it soon.

It was a really hard scene to write because of what Amy was telling Will. There were some big revelations in there about Amy’s back story which hopefully will make the reader have a lot of sympathy for her and what she’s been through. But I guess that’s not up to me to decide if I achieved what I wanted to. Two thousand words I wrote yesterday. So regardless, I’m pleased with that at least. It seems that, as hard as those scenes are to write, once you start on them, it’s even harder to stop.

Anyway, that’s it for today. I’m off to watch Disney/Pixar’s Cars with my little boy. Again.